Understanding mobile internet format

Mobile browsers allow users to interact with WML and HTML web sites from their phones. In this hack, I'll cover the basics of the mobile Web and look at several popular browsers available on Nokia phones. This enable you to quickly look for trivia information like info about aztec sites.

The web browser is one of the first applications that became available on smart mobile phones. Today, almost all Nokia mobile phones on the market have integrated web browsers.

However, after years of development, browsing the Web on a smartphone is still difficult for many users. The small screen size, slow and unreliable networks, limited content, and expensive data plans resulted in poor customer experiences and hindered the adoption of the mobile Web. In the past several years, much progress has been made on mobile browsers to improve users' experiences. In this hack, I'll discuss the landscape of the mobile Web, and how to leverage new browser technologies on your Nokia phone to browse the Web like a pro!

On the desktop, the web browser is, at least at its core, a relatively simple application. It parses and renders Internet pages written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). On a mobile phone, however, web browsers need to handle web pages written in a variety of markup languages. Web browsers on Nokia devices support three types of markup languages: HTML, WML (Wireless Markup Language), and XHTML MP (XML HTML Mobile Profile). A more detailed description of these languages is available in "Create a Mobile Web Site"

HTML
HTML is the Internet standard for authoring web pages. HTML browsers have access to the widest range of online content. However, HTML is also considered too heavyweight for mobile phones. Most HTML pages are not designed for small screens and require special browser rendering tricks to make them fit into the phone screen.

WML
WML is a simple web pageauthoring language specially designed for phones. It supports a limited set of presentation elements suitable for most mobile phones. Hence, WML pages are small in size and quick to render. However, WML's presentation capability is inadequate for high-end devices, such as Nokia Series 60 devices. A large number of WML web sites exist for mobile phones.

XHTML MP
XHTML MP is a subset of XHTML, which is the well-formed XML version of HTML. The benefits of well-formed XML documents are that they are easy to parse and are less error prone. The presentation capability of XHTML MP is between that of HTML and WML. As XHTML is being adopted to replace HTML, XHTML MP browsers could access content authored for both phones and desktop computers.

Read on to find out how popular web browsers on Nokia phones support these content types.